The Purloined Coin: Art, Money and Agency Aestheticist Provocations by Norbert Francis Attard

First published in book Soap to Think with, Norbert Francis Attard, 2022
PAUL SANT CASSIA

 

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INTRODUCTION

 

When I agreed to write a text to accompany the artworks of my friend Norbert Attard, I did not fully appreciate the complexity it would pose.  On the one hand, his themes appear to be local: corruption in his natal Malta (DIRTY MONEY), the effects of the pandemic (COVID-19), and the 2017 assassination of Malta’s prominent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia (INVICTA). Yet they cannot be divorced from wider global issues: the social alchemy of money, the circulation of viruses, and the effects of media disclosures of the networks of complicities to conceal hidden wealth. This is Norbert’s most socially engaged collection of art works.  Norbert's works are ironically beautiful objects that explore these issues in a beautifully ironic way, weaving together the global and the local. They invite anthropological engagement, for art and anthropology have much to say to each other in how we respond to the worlds we live in (Sansi 2015). 

   

In this essay I explore the significance of Norbert’s works on three levels. The first is the relationship between art and money. Although this has received attention by many observers and international artists, as far as I can ascertain Norbert is the first Maltese artist to systematically explore the dark side of money. Whilst grounded in local concerns, his approach nevertheless highlights certain universal features of money that I believe have not previously been explored. Artists, curators, art theorists, community animators, investment advisors, the culture industry, even taxation authorities have been exercised by the implications of art as the ultimate commodity, the role of the artist, and the estimation of artistic labour in advanced capitalist society. But the boundaries between (and identities of) art and money have been less scrutinised and merit attention, especially in terms of their deployment to express actual or anticipated social relationships. By employing certain logics of substitution very akin to what Levi-Strauss called ‘pensee sauvage’, Norbert’s work hints that money has abductive powers. This renders it close to how ancient Greeks viewed money, and bears similarities to Alfred Gell’s anthropological approach to art. Gell argued that art objects are devices ‘for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed’ (1992: 43). This leads me to suggest that we could approach money as our co-evolutionary art product.  In the first part of this essay, I explore the elective affinities of art and money, and the implications for both. 

 

Ancient Greeks, the earliest monetarised society, called money ‘hidden or disappearable wealth/substance’ (ousia aphanes), in contrast to the displayed wealth (ousia phanera) of the earlier Homeric world (land, flocks, women, followers, fine things). Money ‘treasurizes wealth’ (Figueira, 1988:549) rendering it concealable or invisible.  Partly because of its small scale and natural resource paucity, Malta’s political economic default mode has relied heavily (though not exclusively) upon this characteristic of money: from 17th century piracy (legalised corsairing) to contemporary sovereignty capitalization realised through igaming, low corporate tax, and passport sales. Such resource inflows endow the state with immense clientelism potential, structuring resource distribution along partisan lines, and provide opportunities for corruption. Norbert’s works grouped under the headings DIRTY MONEY and INVICTA deal with this phenomenon and its dire implications. In the second part of this essay, I explore the ‘parasitism’ that has integrated Malta into colonial, regional, and transnational economies by reference to Norbert’s artworks that demonstrate how this pervades local society.  

 

Finally, I explore a parallelism between invisible money and microbes. I argue that attempts to curb the transnational circulation of ‘dirty money’ corresponds to a bio-medicalization of the body politic that, whilst compelling, imbricates a specific mode of domination and legitimacy. 

 

 

I. ART AND MONEY

 

1. The first systematic reflection on art and money (by Plato) begins with their condemnation, realised through another equally criticised medium, writing. The social world art and money had brought into being paradoxically generated those very innovations of thought, action, and social organization that permitted Plato’s condemnation. And it was realised through another kindred technology of the intellect, writing, that Plato equally criticised whilst enabling him to elaborate his ideal closed social order.

 

Plato profoundly distrusted art and money, wanting to ban both in his Republic. His Politeia proposed banning the material sign: of value or of beauty, as both attach us to the sensuous world of things, mere semblances, preventing us from acquiring true knowledge of essences and being. By its mimetic and emotional powers, art prevents us from appreciating true essences (‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’) attaching us to mere representations. Money attracted Plato’s opprobrium to a greater extent, banned in his Republic, where it is associated with the Lydian king Gyges, the founder of the Mermnad dynasty, whose magical ring enabled him to become invisible, just as money enables the invisible exercise of unaccountable power and influence at a distance. The Greeks believed Gyges to be the first tyrant. As Shell notes, ‘the frequent association of tyranny and minting with one man suggests that they may be mutually reinforcing and interdependent’ and thus his story (first recounted in Herodotus), ‘however hypothetical or mythical, is a great explanation of the genesis of a political, economic, and verbal semiology’ (1989:22).

 

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle accepted the necessity of money, but likewise linked it to a double deceit: that of the Sophists’ purporting to sell something (wisdom) that should not be sold (and should reached through a ‘gift exchange’, as in a Socratic dialogue), and in delivering a counterfeit in exchange. ‘The sophist is one who makes money (chrimatistis) from apparent (phainomenis) and not real (ousis) wisdom (sophia)’ (1955:165a22). Chrimatistis also signifies a trafficker, thus conjoining secreting false coinage (kibdelos) into the agora by exchanging false knowledge for genuine nomismata (money). 

  

2. Plato’s view that art and money are powerful motivators of emotion and action cannot be denied, even if we discount his specific objections. Ever since art became detached from the patronage of the Temple, Prince, or Cardinal, and with the increased accessibility of the printed text that nurtured the Enlightenment, we now expect art to be politically or socially ‘subversive’. Likewise, the ancient Greek apprehension of money as hidden wealth exerting invisible unaccountable power is a contemporary global concern, evidenced by the Panama/Paradise/Pandora papers, etc.  Ironically, whilst it is now de rigeur for art to be politically engaged, it has become a major avenue for investment and money laundering. Late capitalism easily accommodates, even nurtures, this tension in its chic postmodernist ironic aestheticism (Jameson 1991). Like siblings, art and money have made each other in ways they partly acknowledge, partly reject. I begin by situating Norbert’s art within a wider international context.  I then argue that his heritage and his resolute attempt to plough his own furrow provides us with some important insights about art and money. 

 

3.The political expectations of contemporary art have long generated a major conundrum. At the risk of gross distortion, we can distinguish two broad poles of ideological positionings by contemporary artists and theorists regarding the relationship of art and money: art as ‘critical commodity’ and art as ‘entangling gift’. The former argues that art cannot escape its capitalist context as commodity (‘exchange-value’) but, in the hands of competent artists, could also engage in a critical reflexivity on financialization, including art’s role in this. The ’entangling gift’ approach rejects art as super-commodity in favour of art as a ‘gift’ (‘use-value’) (Sansi 2015). Many artists construct their works to engage viewers as participants. The former concentrate on what art could say, the latter on what it could do. Social theory approaches to the art-money nexus parallel this opposition. Velthuis (2005) labels them the ‘Nothing But’ and the ‘Hostile Worlds’. In the former, ‘aesthetic or artistic value is .. [  ] .. “Nothing But” a particular form of economic value’ (2005: 26). In the latter, money and art are opposed: “what strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture” (Hughes 1990: 20). 

 

Ironically, both neo-liberal economists and post-Marxists subscribe to the ‘Critical Commodity’/‘Nothing But’ thesis. The former domesticate art’s exceptionality by arguing that “works of art are economic goods, their value can be measured by the market, [and] the sellers and buyers of art - the people who create and benefit from it - are people who try to get as much as they can from what they have” (Grampp 1989, p. 8). For post-Marxists, by contrast,  from Benjamin to Adorno and his successors,  art and money’s  imbrication requires unravelling. Following Jameson, Haiven argues that art ‘cannot be corrupted by capitalism because it has always already been derivative of capitalism’ (2018:15). In the age of financialization, art must grapple with “Jameson’s conundrum”: if capitalism is more than a mode of production but a totality, a culture, it is inherently unrepresentable yet demands representation. Capitalism’s representability through art is doomed to be both partial and compromised because art is itself shaped by it and thus far from independent. This leads Haiven to suggest that the ‘crises of representation under capitalist totality’ (2015:38) is realised through the ‘mutual encryption’ of money and art (2018:14). This felicitous expression indicates simultaneously “conversion”, “concealment”, and “entombment” (i.e., crypt or vault of sacred relics). He employs the term ‘money-art’ to signify that it is an ‘important laboratory for financialization, a curious, unique field of self-reflexive activities that is at once deeply alien and highly germane to the capitalist economy from which it (sometimes antagonistically) emerges’ (2018:123). 

 

3. Some fifty years ago, Adorno appeared to identify art’s aporetic destination in a gnomic utterance: ‘The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity’ ([1970] 1997:21). We could see evidence of this in the contemporary secondary art market of major auction houses that have increasingly encroached on the art gallery primary market (Adam 2014: 50; Velthuis 2005). As Adam notes, globalized art dealers have transformed contemporary artists into brands replacing museums in setting taste agendas: slick auction houses now provide financial services, art-fund managers abound, and art has become a futures market. Unsurprisingly, artists have engaged with this phenomenon in emblematic works. These range from Klein’s Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) where he sold empty space for gold dust, or his Le Vide (1958) featuring an empty whitewashed gallery whose ‘pictures’ were for sale (art-commodity as its own apotheosis), to  Banksy’s mocking self-destructing Love is in the Bin (2018) (art-commodity as shredded expensive detritus), to Damien Hirst’s insouciant mortuary art of neoliberal narcissism, For the Love of God (2007): a diamond encrusted skull, priced at some 50 million GBP (the ‘absolute commodity’ qua ‘absolute’ ‘artwork’). 

 

One early attempt to subvert art’s pictorial quality - price/exchange value nexus was Klein’s 1957 exhibition “The Blue Epoch” where he displayed differentially priced, but perfectly identical, monochrome paintings, on the presumption that “the pictorial quality of each painting was perceivable by means of something else besides the material appearance” (Duve 1989:78). Klein thus inverted the conventional formula of ‘Pictorial Quality plus Social Estimation equals Exchange Value/Price’, to ‘Differential Price (for identical object) determines Perceived Pictorial Quality’. Duve is thus correct to note that ‘[M]ystified mystifier, Klein is, like [neoliberal] economists, the theologian of the artistic commodity’ (ibid.:79), but amiss in not pursuing his initial intuition: that Klein was the necessary Tartuffe to stage Jameson’s conundrum of representing Capital. 

 

Adorno argued that the convergence of the art object as ‘absolute commodity’ ‘would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself: It exists for those who hold power’ (1997:236). This paradox may mislead. To exist ‘merely-for-itself’, an ‘absolute commodity’ should have no history, no adhering trajectory of ownership. Therefore, a Salvator Mundi (emblematic of stratospheric price = commoditization), or any Old Master, are disqualified, whilst contemporary art is perfect for neophiliac capitalism voraciously generates art for its consumption.  To ‘exist for those who hold power’ it must be nothing other than self-referential sign-as-sign, not of anything else. In short, self-proclaimed ‘bling’. Requiring an immense sacrifice to acquire, it must be predicated on an unrecoverable loss. But its acquisition can only be through the art auction ‘tournament of value’ circuit as ever ascending losses for its serial purchasers, that are simultaneously ever ascending profits for its serial consigners. Entangled in its past ownership histories, the ‘absolute commodity’ may be an unachievable asymptote, just as the ‘pure gift’ is compromised by the obligation to reciprocate. 

 

Whilst Klein is the theologian of the artistic commodity, Hirst may well be its alchemist, an unrecognized merry heir of Piero Manzoni. If Klein is ‘a mystifier, it's because he is totally sincere in making others believe that he is a mystic and even more so in making them doubt his sincerity’ (Duve, ibid.: 76), Hirst is provocatively brutal in demystifying art as pure singular commodity, whilst making us uneasy with his artful artlessness: “I have proved it to myself that art is about life and the art world is about money. And I’m the only one who... knows that. Everyone lies to themselves to make it seem like it’s the other way. But it isn’t.” No surprise then that so important was it to maintain his skull’s aesthetic nominal value of 50 million GBP (its fiduciarity in monetary terms) above its ‘bullion’ value (i.e., its constituent diamonds, reputedly some 20 million GBP), that it was bought-in by a consortium, including the artist, when it failed to find a buyer. Its trajectory thus parallels a Central Bank’s desperate selling of its foreign reserves to prop up its own currency: an instantiation of Haiven’s mutual ‘encryption’ of money and art, and its ‘entombment’ qua skull, in a bank vault.    

 

4. By contrast, the ‘embedded gift’ or ‘Hostile Worlds’ practitioners (Gallerists, artists, and theorists) strive to bracket art from extreme financialization or commoditization. New York contemporary art dealers, attempting to suppress the commodity character of their artworks, establish complex patterns of reciprocity including gift exchanges, dinners and compensatory purchases, with their “family” of artists and collectors (Velthuis 2005). Caught between the former who desire higher prices/more publicity and tempted by more glamorous mega-galleries, and the latter who may resell on the secondary auction market, New York gallerists resemble traditional benign ‘Mafiosi’ challenged by more ruthless ‘syndicates’ of globalized gallerists and Auction Houses. 

 

Art critics and theorists regularly bemoan art’s hijacking by ‘cold money’ (Hyde 1983, Hughes 1990).  Art, they argue, is fundamentally not a commodity or exchange value but emotional value. It is made, staged, and intentioned as a socially transformative interaction, even a ‘gift’ residual in labour power (Beuys).  Critical in envisioning alternative non-exploitative, non-monetary, social relationships through the exchange of goods and services was Mauss’ ‘The Gift’ (orig. publ.1925).  But whereas anthropologists were interested in how order is maintained in ‘archaic’ stateless societies through overlapping obligations, theorists and artists were attracted by the ‘freedom’ the gift-as-art could promise. Mauss’ competitive (and constraining) potlatch was thus transformed and reinterpreted: by Bataille who saw it as an ‘expense without return’, then by Debord’s Situationists who wanted dissolve the distinctions between work and leisure, and between artists and others (Sansi 2014:94).

 

One artist deserves mention as the trickster of art as both gift and commodity: J.S.G. Boggs (1955-2017). Boggs literalised ‘money’ as art, whilst ‘metaphorising’ (i.e., transporting) art as money. He is the ‘American Klein’, as disarmingly earnest through his ‘cash and carry’ ambush, as Klein was mystifyingly disarming through his feline flânerie.  Boggs produced meticulous pen-drawn single sided ‘copies’ of banknotes with which he attempted to pay at their face value for commodities as declared artwork: labour time into artwork as pure simulated money, offered as means of commodity exchange, money’s function. If accepted, he insisted on receiving the change in ‘real money’, duly receipted and documented: artwork reduced to (and recorded as) its simulated ‘face value’ as money. The receipt and change (as the record of a realized commodity exchange) were then sold to a collector together with the details of the person who had originally accepted the artwork banknote. The ‘worthless’ record/receipt of a commodity exchange thus itself became a commodity at a higher price than its negligible face-value trace. They also functioned as the history and ratification of the artwork’s genuine provenance. The collector could then contact the original payee (‘seller’ or ‘gift exchanger’?) and offer to purchase the ‘banknote’ at a price far higher than its original surface value at which it had originally been accepted, should the latter accept. The artwork thus became a ‘gift’, i.e., promise of higher monetary return to the original recipient that could become a commodity should he ‘cash in’ the gift he received in exchange for the ‘gift’ he originally gave, the ‘purchased’ commodity.  In this way, an artwork slipped vertiginously in and out of ‘money’, ‘gift’, and ‘commodity’ in a ‘comedy of values’ (Weschler 1999). Unsurprisingly, Boggs was harassed by our Ulama, the Guardians of the Sign as Value:  the US Treasury and the Bank of England who prosecuted him and raided his studio. Equally predictably, his artwork is now displayed in, and guarded by, our other Banks of Apotheosized Materiality: The British Museum and MOMA. 

 

The above examples are ‘jokey’, intellectually provocative, even ‘Groucho Marxian’. Laughter and irony may well be a major route to bypass ‘Jameson’s Conundrum’. But art’s elective affinity to money can cling to it like Nessus’ poisoned cloak, or Manzoni’s “Merda d’artista”.  Artists and their ratifying art institutions are dependent on the spectacle. Like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to whom they bear more than a passing resemblance, ‘critical commodity’ artists from Koons to Hirst may have to ‘fake it until they make it’. Indeed, Vishmidt has subtitled her book Speculation as a Mode of Production (2019), ‘Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital’ (added emphasis) to tease out the doubling, (but also potentially antithetic significance), of speculation as a mode of valorization in the economy and in art, as well as to introduce the notion of value via the subject. 

 

5. Despite the localist referents of Norbert’s artworks, it would be a disservice to see them as mere socio-political critique. I characterize the artworks here as a modernist aesthetic sensibility employing post-modernist means with serious intent. His personal route to artistic social engagement is quite distinct from the two general approaches outlined above: that of an ironic aestheticism through symbolic substitutions. The aestheticism is part of his cultural heritage; the symbolic substitutions an aspect of ‘Mediterranean irony’. These substitutions employ what Levi-Strauss calls ‘savage thought’, working like a bricoleur with adapted items at hand (soap for money, etc.). As a canny ‘primitive’ artist, Norbert signifies the object (money/passports) either by substitution or repetition rather than reproducing it, even if he paradoxically does so by emphasizing money’s protean reproducibility. He operates in the opposite direction to Boggs who ‘reproduced’ the object as singularly different (drawing ‘money’ as work of art) in order to destabilize its original encoded meaning (money as state-monopolized means of exchange etc.). Tucked into Norbert’s aesthetic treatment of ‘Dirty Money’ with its visual punning, repetitions, inversions, and substitutions is an unconscious suggestion that only art can make. From a Levi-Straussian perspective, art expresses a ‘deep homology between the structure of the signifier and that of the signified’ (Wiseman 2007:121). Norbert’s unconscious suggestion is that money has art-like qualities, thus recoupling Plato’s ‘deceiving duo’ on a higher plane.  Levi Strauss noted that with works of art ‘the starting point is a set of one or more objects and one or more events which aesthetic creation unifies by revealing a common structure’ (1966:26). That ‘common structure’, I argue below, lies partly in money’s abductive power, its ability to act upon us, rendering it very close to art itself. We could call this ‘Platonism Mark II’. 

 

Both art and money are mediators, employed to establish specific types of social relationships. They are also (i) referential to other signs in a system laid over a peopled world to manipulate it through their respective technologies, employing specific cultural logics, and (ii) ‘modèles réduits’ (Levi Strauss 1962) of social relations, although they operate in different directions. Art compresses a series of dia-(or)allochronic social exchanges (events) into a synthetic synchronic arrangement of objects; money projects a synchronic exchange of objects into a diachronic social arrangements. Although art, being closely tied to myth, precedes money and writing, the three are our co-evolutionary technologies, kin to each other, human products that have shaped and express our humanity and sociality. Like siblings they have a complicated relationship. Envy and admiration, competition and solidarity, imitation and one-upmanship, alliance and hostility, dependence and independence, characterise their relations, particularly between art and money. In Weberian terms they share an ‘elective affinity’ to each other.   

 

6. In making this suggestion I draw inspiration from Gell’s ‘methodological philistinism’ in his treatment of art where he eschews aesthetics, arguing that what theology does for religion, aesthetics does for art: it becomes a scholarly cult refractive to the social efficacy of art objects. We could similarly view economics as money’s ‘theology’, with its origin myths (e.g., “money replaces barter”), its complex theories and rival schools with their ‘Pretence of Knowledge’ (in Hayek’s words), dismissive of popular ideas about money’s mysterious powers. Gell argues that art objects are devices ‘for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed’ (1992:43). The power of art objects ‘stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology. The enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form. Art, as a separate kind of technical activity, only carries further, through a kind of involution, the enchantment which is immanent in all kinds of technical activity’ (1992:44, original emphasis). If we can recognise this enchantment of visual staging in Las Meninas, could we not acknowledge that the mining of cryptocurrencies or the financialization of art through NFT’s, also activate an analogous enchantment of technology, however mysterious they may appear to some of us? 

 

7. In conventional western art theory, objects are passive: they attract our interest, engagement or contemplation. Gell dismissed aesthetical approaches to art arguing that art is abductive. An art object embodies ‘a special kind of technology that captivates and ensnares others in the intentionalities of its producers’ (Pinney and Thomas 2001: vii). Gell defines art objects as a class of thing-agents (including religious representations, icons and statues), the ‘equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents’ (1998:7). An extreme example of a thing-agent is a religious representation that performs miracles. A prosaic example is the aftermath of the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa when thousands queued to gaze at its empty space on the wall. Here, the Mona Lisa became a ‘thing-agent’ exercising its agency through its absence. Is that not indicative of an art object’s abductive power that its very absence draws crowds? The thing/index (e.g., ‘Mona Lisa’) appears to act autonomously; it ‘itself (is) seen as the outcome, and/or the instrument of, social agency’ (1998:15). Gell argues that ‘the work of art is inherently social in the way the merely beautiful or mysterious object is not: it is a physical entity which mediates between two beings, a channel for further social relations and influences’ (1992:52).

 

Gell defined the anthropology of art as ‘the theoretical study of social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency' (1998:7). An ‘art nexus' consists of the interactions of ‘agents’ and ‘patients’. Agents and patients are not necessarily persons. Whilst the agent is normally considered the artist or a commissioning patron, it could even be a thing itself. A miraculous statue is the agent, the pilgrims are its patients. The Sistine Chapel is the agent, its visitors are its patients abducted by its world. The art nexus, i.e., the interactions of agents and patients, can also extend to the artistic process itself. Consider when a bicycle handlebar and seat suggested a bull’s head to Picasso. Picasso did not set out to make a bull’s head. Gell would argue that the components and Picasso ‘abducted’ each other to produce something new. The former ‘needed’ a ‘Picasso’ to re-cognise them, whilst Picasso had the imaginative suppleness to appropriate their indexical value and make them his. The handlebar and the seat provided the material for what Peirce calls an ‘abductive inference’ to take place. ‘The material 'index' (the visible, physical, ‘thing’ or components) permitted a particular cognitive operation’ which resulted in the creation of a bull’s head that looks remarkably palaeolithic. Gell calls such artistic operations ‘the abduction of agency’ (1998:13). As artists recognise, it is hard in such cases to fully distinguish whether the artist was the agent or the patient, for they are often both.  Are we not witnessing an analogous process of artistic abduction with Norbert’s coining of soap bars as money, and thus a complex enactment of agency? Shoehorning this in Aristotelian terms, we could say that the bars of soap were the ‘material cause’, and the artist the ‘efficient cause’ who recognized their indexical value to make an abductive inference and produce his sculptures.

 

In Gell’s schema, art objects have agency because they operate in specific social contexts. They act upon us in intentional ways. He defines agency in art as ‘a culturally prescribed framework for thinking about causation, when what happens is (in some vague sense) supposed to be intended in advance by some person-agent or thing-agent. Whenever an event is believed to happen because of an 'intention' lodged in the person or thing which initiates the causal sequence, that is an instance of 'agency' (1998:17).

 

8. If this notion of agency can be applied to an Asmat shield, a Trobriand canoe prow, Achilles’ armour donned by Patroclus (both designed to dismay opponents), or some charm against the evil eye (that act on people in their vicinity who become ‘patients’), could we not extend a similar abductive potency to money? In addition to viewing it as substance (a ‘store of value’) or function (a ‘means of exchange’), we could also approach it as having an agency of its own in that it abducts its owner. Money abducts us in that its actual or anticipated possession stimulates us to think what we can or should do with it, from “saving for a rainy day”, to a gift, to realising some investment or indulgence. It demands engagement.  It shapes the “dreams for those who are awake”, which is why Plato (the quote’s author) rejected both money and art. Although we are often the primary agents (the ‘efficient cause’ in Aristotelian terms), money as ‘material cause’ gives specific shape to the result (the ‘final cause’). If, as Bachelard suggested, ‘Man is a creature of desire, not of need’, money has long been one of desire’s shapers.

 

Although Gell’s theory has its critics, its influence has extended from anthropology (Pinney and Thomas 2001, Sansi 2015), to classics (Osborne and Tanner 2007), and aesthetics and art history (Preziosi and Farago 2012).  Nor is it strictly new, for some of Gell’s key concepts were hinted at in Pliny’s History of Art: deception, skill, entrapment, and ‘distributed personhood’ (when one artist leaves his intervention on another’s painting as his ‘calling card’), etc.  When reflecting on Gell’s Art and Agency in connection with Norbert’s works, I was struck that money could also be approached as our collective co-evolutionary artistic enterprise.  This is not to say that ‘money is art’, or is ‘artistic’, although its tokens (coins or notes) have often been. Rather, it is to begin by noting that popular accounts of money attribute an agency to it very much in line with Gell’s notion of that of what art objects do. An agent, such as money (and art) 'causes events to happen' in their vicinity’ (1998:16). Popular discourse attributes money with miraculous, often corrupting, powers. As Gell notes ‘social agency can be exercised relative to 'things' and social agency can be exercised by 'things’ (1998:17). 

 

9. When we examine the way money works across time, we can intuit that it progressively operates like a vast collective art project creating value, employing techniques and representation, activating exchange, sociality, power, agency, ‘fetishism’ and abduction, and realising personhood. Although money and art are clearly two distinct spheres of human expression and action governed by different logics and rationalities, there are significant parallelisms between the two, and their contemporary convergence provides valuable insights into the nature of money, and by extension art. Simmel (2004) illuminated his treatment of money by references to art arguing that money moves progressively from substance to function. What Klee had said of 20th century art, ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (1961: 76), applies to contemporary money, but with a twist: ‘money renders the invisible visible, whilst potentially vanishing its human agency’ (qua ousia aphanes/’corruption’). In this collection of artworks, we encounter an artist’s innovative take on the significance of money in its local socio-political context. But they are more than that, for Norbert’s punning substitutions interrogate money’s mysterious agency through its slippery haecceity (the-what-it-is).  

 

10. Scholars have long debated the origins of money that occurred contemporaneously with writing in different parts of the world. The ‘beginnings’ of money qua coinage probably lie in transferring an image from a seal or die to a piece of metal and calling it chremata (money as means of exchange) or nomisma (money as legal tender, issued by a central authority): ‘it is at any rate certain that the seal is directly related to the earliest coins - it is the antecedent of the struck coin...It signifies, or rather marks, ownership, and such is endowed with a special aura that was originally magical’ (Gernet 1977:125, original emphasis).

 

Hart notes that Keynes viewed coins as ‘a mere act of ostentation appropriate to the offspring of Croesus and the neighbours of Midas’, concluding that ‘the stamping of pieces of metal with a trade-mark was just a piece of local vanity, patriotism or advertisement with no far-reaching importance’ (quoted in Hart, 2000:245). Keynes's aim in downgrading the significance of coinage was to ‘establish that, as a social creation, money did not have to wait until coins were struck; and it is this aspect of making money, rather than finding it in the form of natural objects, that he wanted to stress. Money is a thing, but it also has to be named, and it is this act of naming that is more truly creative and social than manufacturing per se’ (2000:246, added emphasis). That act of naming a thing to be cognised as a representation of a store, measure of value, and medium of exchange, is an artistic creation stealthily concealing its own artifice. Art involves a cunning material transubstantiation through a symbolic substitution. As Marx noted "gold and silver themselves become their own symbols".

 

11. Both art and money employ transsubstantive powers that abduct or entrap us, the concealed reason for Plato’s suspicion. Catholic readers readily recognize the notion of ‘transubstantiation’ where the ritual of the mass transubstantiates a wheaten wafer into the body of Christ. Transubstantiation also occurs in both art and money. Consider Picasso’s joining together of a bicycle handlebar and seat to conjure a bull’s head, or a €500 bill whose crypto security features transform it into a store of value. 

 

By ‘transsubstantive’ I therefore mean the transformation of one thing into another by the application of a secret skill, ingenuity, ritual, or projection, sometimes with the imputed assistance of third-party ‘occult’ (i.e., unseen) powers, such that the final product is believed to act upon others, influencing their behaviour, emotional state, or condition.  This class of set-apart objects could include a Trobriand canoe prow, Achilles’ mythical shield, a Eucharistic bread, a lump of silver stamped into a coin, a 500-euro money note, Norbert’s ‘Money Soap’ or his ‘Roulette Wheel’, etc. In all of these, some ‘occult’ power is believed to have been brought to bear to transform the object into something more potent than its constituent matter or arrangement such that it entraps, enhances, or illuminates the user, possessor, or viewer. Thus, magical secret spells accompany the carving of a Trobriand canoe prow such that, once completed, it flies over the sea to other islands enabling its crew to seduce Kula valuables away from their exchange partners, Achilles’ shield  is fashioned by Hephaestus’ ‘craft and cunning’ into ‘a world of gorgeous immortal work’, the invisible tyrant’s ring seal imprints his all-seeing presence on coins holding his subjects in his thrall through his representation, crypto-security features transubstantiate a piece of paper into a store of value and medium of exchange, Norbert’s ‘Money Soap’ expresses money’s power as ousia aphanes to disappear, and his  ‘Roulette Wheel’  hints at the transformation of  inscrutable  moira (fate) into nemesis. In all these examples we witness a transubstantiation that is abductive. 

 

Money and art are two sides of the same metonymic coin with which we pay ourselves to both shape and realise our fantasies. Money, particularly in its contemporary form, could be approached as a collective ‘art project’ because it is a mysterious agency of über-function setting in motion what art does in a restricted way: an ‘infinite range of substitutions’ (Jameson 2011:34).

 

12. One difficulty in approaching money as art is that it appears prosaic and profane. Like the State (initially the tyrant) that ensured its production and acceptance (Knapp 1926), it now appears ‘natural’. We could say that art (qua human creativity) ‘coined’ money as the metaphor of value by ‘metonymizing’ it as coin. Undoubtedly, this solidity and ‘naturalness’ was achieved through its anchoring qua currency in precious metals (gold/silver), becoming a sign with inherent material value. Yet coinage was always a sign of surplus material value extracted through social alchemy. Coinage’s bullion content as precious metal was always less than its nominal value as coin/currency. This fiduciarity is nothing else than a state-sustained social connivance at the artfulness of its transubstantiation into something more than it is. This social fiction is essential for the state from ancient Athens onwards, as the difference in value is its “cut”, its monopoly. Simmel (2004) argued that this heritage of substance-value, much like the ‘realism’ that pervaded most western art until the 20th century, prevents us from recognising money’s essential function: the transformation of qualitative differences into quantitative ones. Detached from substance-value and the abandonment of the Bretton-Woods system, contemporary money is now pure sign whose value emerges from its relationship to other signs (Goux and DiPiero 1988). One could argue that money has become so functionally successful as our collective co-evolutionary art product that its cunningness pervades our cognition such that we never question its social artifice.

 

Traditionally, art, i.e., techne in both making things and performing, from Homeric gifts to Trobriand vaygua to the reliquaries of Conques and beyond, made ‘quality’: the singular, the gift, the person (from the Homeric warrior to the Christian pilgrim). Money made ‘quantity’, often challenging the singularity of the former. Anthropologists recognise that despite money’s corrosive properties it can be ‘domesticated’, channelled through circuits (Parry & Bloch 1989), expressing kinship and creating personal relations as ‘gift’. But where it is diverted away from the collectivity to the private it becomes graft: hidden, transferred through circuitous routes, forming cabals which the Maltese label their ‘Mafia State’, a theme explored in Norbert’s works.

 

13. Money has ‘art-like’ qualities for three reasons: (i) it represents through a particular technology, (ii) has abductive power and (iii) through its employment personhood is distributed, and agency realised. Together with its coeval, writing, money is the most extraordinary social technology humans have devised as a means of representation, information storage, social organization, and action. It is also a mode of thinking, a ‘distribution of mind’ in and through persons and things, enabling us to navigate and transform the world and ourselves. It is a means of commensurate representation (as ‘unit of account’), a realisation of potentiality (as ‘medium of exchange’) and possesses inherent power (as ‘store of value’). If an art object embodies ‘a special kind of technology that captivates and ensnares others in the intentionalities of its producers’ (Pinney and Thomas 2001: vii, added emphasis), then money can be considered as a very distinct collective ‘art object’, admittedly with no original ‘author’ or ‘artist’, but nevertheless a particular technology ensnaring others in the intentionalities of its users. It is the personal usage that realises the intentionality of money as collective art project. The very representative function of money (from silver drachmas to virtual digits as signs), i.e., its representativeness, its performativity (for, like words, we ‘do things’ with it), and the creativity in its employment to realise our desires, necessitates that we take money as a product of collective imagination, representation, and engagement (i.e., all features of ‘art’) seriously. At a minimum level, therefore, money and art share an elective affinity, even if they work in opposite directions: the former towards incomparable comparability, the latter towards emblematic singularity. And they do so via inverted styles: contemporary money through its artful artlessness, and contemporary art often through artless artfulness. 

 

14. The origins of money appear to lie in the imprinting (entyposis) of the image or symbol of the tyrant’s seal ring (daktylios) (Gernet 1977). This may appear a curio, but money is above all the creation of a sign that represents and measures value to realise exchanges between things. It is realised through a technology or technical knowledge that is either secret or controlled that cannot be appropriated for that purpose within the territory within which that sign is sovereign.   Money is a sign-monopoly through a medium-monopoly. As Marshall McLuhan noted, ‘the content of any medium [ money: PSC] is always another medium [stamping coins, printing notes, mining/blockchain ledgers-PSC]’. Reflecting on the seal-ring Platt (1995) puns with serious intent on the seal as a ‘(meta)physical artefact’, for there is a sense in which the seal as the imprinting of a Form donates a new identity to matter, magically transforming it.  This applies to the transformation of metal into coins, the printing of special paper into currency notes, the application of computing power to ‘mine’ bitcoin, and even stamping a cross onto a wafer/dough. In all these cases, the basic technical act of imprinting a representation or symbol of some supreme authority as a mark on the surface, through some secret or ritual powers that confer authenticity, transforms that thing qua matter into something else. Thus transubstantiated the item becomes a ‘(meta)physical product’ that, in Gell’s words, like art ‘casts a spell over us.’ 

 

If an artwork is quintessentially a trap that ensnares us, as Gell argues, then money certainly does so, but without any conscious ‘artistry’ which renders its techne, its cunningness, even more wily through its illusion of transparency. Gell had argued that the Trobriand Garden is a ‘Collective Work of Art’, because it is ‘both the outcome of a certain system of technical knowledge and at the same time a collective work of art, which produces yams by magic’ (1992:60).  Similar connotations could be attributed to the ‘Contemporary Money Garden’, the Stock Exchange: a system of technical knowledge, skill, and experience, plus a certain ‘magic’ (and subterfuge) which enables ‘magicians’ like Warren Buffet (for example), our modern Midas, to produce the greatest ‘yams’, whose advice is avidly followed by thousands of prospective investors/’gardeners’. 

 

15. Plato latched onto a common feature of art and money: their propensity to deceive, though with very different moral implications. One is held to be inspirational (“the lie that tells the truth”, Picasso), the other is considered morally corrosive (“the root of all evil”, St Paul). Both money and art were traditionally seen as things, ‘substance’ in Simmel’s terms (2004): marble, bronze, painted canvas, etc; gold, silver, copper coins and banknotes. Their value inhered in the object itself that exercised a quasi-magical power on the subject, the ‘patient’ in Gell’s terms. But both harbour what Goody (1996) had called a ‘kernel of doubt’ expressed in the terms ‘Veil of money’, ‘Veil of painting’. The former refers to whether money deceives us by making us think that it has special properties through its ‘veiling’, rather than a mere commodity like others. The ‘Veil of painting’ works in an opposite direction: revelation of deception. Art’s ‘history’ commences with a simulated concealment that becomes a revelation through the deception of the master painter Zeuxis. In their artistic competition, Parrhasius tricks Zeuxis (whose painting of a bowl of fruit had deceived birds to peck at it), by painting a veil ‘concealing’ the anticipated painting beneath, that Zeuxis impatiently attempts to draw open only to discover that the ‘concealing’ veil was the painting. This mythical anecdote initiates Pliny’s history of painting as a warning not so much of the cunningness of representation, but rather of the cunning of cunningness: human beings can be the victims of their own deception by bringing to an encounter what they expect to find. The revelation is not Parrhasius’s cunning painting; it is that Zeuxis, like us, can deceive himself, just as we consider money to have an inherent value. We delight in unveiling the cunning of art because we intuit that it is appearance, we detest money’s deceiving veiling because we resent that it may well be so.  

 

16. Two reasons can be advanced why contemporary money can be approached as approximating a collective if humourless art project. The first comes from a transformation of art itself. Benjamin highlights the decay in art’s ‘auratic quality’ (i.e., its traditional aura) through its reproducibility: ‘technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility’ (Benjamin 2008:24). Through reproduction, traditional art loses its monopoly of the visual as magical effect, i.e., as apparition. As Adorno noted ‘artworks are images as apparition, as appearance, and not as a copy’ (1997:84, original emphasis). Art’s aura of cultic value now melts into exhibition value, and often as pure exhibition value.

 

A second reason is contemporary money’s shedding of its substance value in favour of its pure sign value. This sign value is monopolised, i.e., it cannot be ‘copied’ even as ‘art’. Money does not mock itself. It can only permit this through art as its ultimate self-indulgence.  Any ‘copy’ is a forgery because it requires protection qua sign.  This is quite different to ancient money where the forgery subsisted in lower silver content. But things then were more subtle. Ancient Athens stationed dokimastes (money testers) in the agora to check the validity of silver drachmas that were produced without Athenian authorisation throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Bad coins would be confiscated, but “sincere imitations” were accepted in the interests of encouraging trade, a pragmatic compromise (Ober 2009). “Sincere imitation”, like an ‘Athenian Boggs’? Not quite. This ‘testing’ of drachmas was an important ritual of power to scaffold their appearance value. What was important was to reject some. The rejection ratified the accepted ones. But so insecure has the appearance value of money become with its increasing dematerialisation that the modern State attempted a Keystone Cops recovery of the image with Boggs’ arrest and prosecution. A hand-drawn copy of a bank note moved from a “sincerely provocative imitation” to a “dangerous counterfeit”. Boggs’ prosecution illustrates that the State resolutely protects modern money-sign’s non-reproducibility as its own art product qua pure sign, even if the artist patently ‘copied’ it to ironically transubstantiate it into art. In short, that modern money is pure apparition just like art.  

 

Is this not a confirmation that money has assumed an aura previously occupied by art’s singularity? Boggs’ currency notes were a self-advertising simulacrum. Yet Deleuze notes that ‘the simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbours a positive power which denies the original and the copy ... the model and the reproduction’ (1990: 262). He suggests ‘simulation designates the power of producing an effect. But this is not intended only in a causal sense...It is intended rather in the sense of a “sign” issued from a process of signalization; it is in the sense of a costume, or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another’ (1990: 263). Boggs’ ‘performance art’, within which his arrest was central, exposed two things. First, that money’s signalization power (to use Deleuze’s term), is fabricated in reverse through an iconoclasm. The prohibition of any copy conjures the sign as ‘original non-copyable’ despite its immense material multiplicity. Second, that process of disguising is fundamental to money’s ‘currency’ as pure non-self-referential signification. We could say that money is humankind’s cunning art product that jealously denies any exposure of its artistry, unless exposed through something more cunning that, in employing ‘savage thought’, literalizes metaphor: art itself, and thus mockery. 

 

17. Thus liberated as pure sign value, money readily usurps art’s previously embedded role in representing qualitative distinction. Not only is art’s previously magical trans-substantive potential now largely residual in money, but its cultic value and aura is demonstrated through that very calibration, as manifested in ‘potlatching’ auctions.

 

It is thus hardly surprising that art’s lost monopoly of its jealously guarded technologies for apparition production qua representation (from the gnomon to the camera obscura and photography), and thus of the visual that contributed to its previously cultic status, has oriented it in new directions: experimentation and engagement with the world, from the oft-quoted ‘Duchampian intervention’ via the readymade, to inter alia in making things happen, as in processual art. This explains both the attraction of anthropology and social theory for artists, and paradoxically Baudrillard’s frustration when he complained that contemporary art is a ‘reflective game with the contemporary world as it happens’ (2005:89). Let us note the difference to modern art where the object had aesthetic autonomy. Contemporary art creates itself through its own speculation (Haiven 2018:43), which explains why many contemporary artists’ ‘omnivorous metabolism’ (ibid.:22) has turned them into theorists of a sublime that despises any notion of the sublime.    

 

18. Contemporary art and money converge in the way they operate, and art can provide a particularly illuminative - if often cryptic or elliptic - handle on the way money operates. Both now function not so much as things, as repositories of material, aesthetic, or cultic value, but as expressing actual and anticipated potential social relationships. The type of contemporary art I am referring to is ‘relational art’ (Bourriaud 2002): ‘installations’, arrangements of objects, engagements with the public that construe ‘human relations as artwork’ (ibid.: 44). This is not to discount that money searches art as a means of investment; indeed, art has become one main avenue of money laundering. But as this collection of artworks shows, art can explore money’s material and conceptual elusiveness to our anthropological benefit. 

 

19. In contemporary money and art, we discover similar processes:

 

(i) Contemporary money has become detached from its fixed place of issue (the nation state), just as art has become detached from its cultural treasure bank (the museum and art gallery): they have become deterritorialised.

(ii) Like art, which is no longer a static object of contemplation, money is no longer an immutable essence, a fixed object of value. In both there is an ‘instability and diversity in the concept of form’ (Bourriaud 2002: 20), which is a ‘relational property’ (ibid:21). This is a source of irritated incomprehension by substantial public segments accustomed to considering art as a thing to view, having certain recognisable features, a ‘form’, in much the same way that cryptocurrencies and virtual currencies lacking recognisable forms or substance are viewed with suspicion. Similar possibilities and challenges are present in both.

(iii) Like money, contemporary art is a ‘place that produces a specific sociability’ (Bourriaud 2002: 17); it is a ‘social interstice’ (ibid.:14).

(iv) In a world that has become increasingly standardised, money is used to realise personal identities and alignments (donations to charities, causes, etc). Just as art activates ‘relational aesthetics’ (i.e., the different ways personal aesthetics relate to each other), money expresses ‘relational ethics’ (i.e., the different ways people navigate and relate to others by virtue of dispensing money). Money mediates personhood, just as contemporary art attempts to interrogate it in ‘idiosyncratic’ ways.

(v) Just as art ‘keeps together moments of subjectivity’ (Bourriaud 2002:20), money acts as a ‘bonding agent’. In contrast to more traditional art and money, these linkages are transitory, to be replaced by others with different configurations and rationalities.

 

20. To many, contemporary art appears elusive. But then so does contemporary money. Some confirmation of its elusiveness comes from Dodd: ‘[W]hether idealised as collective memory or denigrated as socially corrosive, ‘‘money’’ in its generic sense is a utopia - a non-place where form and idea coalesce’ (2005:409). This renders money close to contemporary art precisely despite (or because of) the latter’s often perplexing imperspicuity, for - like money - art is inter alia constantly in search of realising significance qua value where it was not previously discerned. But whereas money realises value through its metamorphosis of quality into quantity, art does so through its metamorphosis of unrecognised quantity into the intuited quality of singularity: ‘the artistic process is completed as soon as it has succeeded in presenting the object in its unique significance’ (Simmel 2004:451). And it is this singularity that money attempts to capture through the celebrity art auction that is the performance of singularity: quantity into quality.      

 

In the next section I explore several Norbert’s works in their political economic context.